


We Have Heard The Chimes at Midnight

by ghosthorse_tracks



Category: I'll Be Seeing You (Song)
Genre: 1940's, F/F, Literary References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 14:52:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5544083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosthorse_tracks/pseuds/ghosthorse_tracks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time she saw Joyce Marlow, Lydia was sitting at a table in the corner of the Chestnut Café in 1940.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Have Heard The Chimes at Midnight

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this forever ago. It was supposed to be a treat for Jukebox 2014, but I was too shy to post it.

Lydia Graham was crying at the cinema. She was sitting alone in a theater filled with couples, sobbing uncontrollably into her trembling hands as a second-rate Selznick melodrama played on the screen. A wave of shame washed over her. She had always hated girls who cried at the cinema. Surely other young women were crying as well, as they had become more wrapped up in the lives of Joseph Cotten and – was that Ginger Rogers? – than they had ever dreamed they would. They had their boyfriends' shoulders to lean into; they had their boyfriends to reassure them it's all right, Ginger Rogers will be just fine, and she and Joseph Cotten will be together always, just like you and me, darling.

Lydia wasn't thinking of the unbearable plight of Ginger Rogers as she cried – she was thinking of her own, a plight much quieter and much less beautiful.

The first time she saw Joyce Marlow, Lydia was sitting at a table in the corner of the Chestnut Café in 1940. The café smelled strongly of coffee and warmth and nostalgia. Jazz music played in the background as the other patrons chatted softly. There were just enough people to make the place feel inhabited but not so many as to make it feel crowded. As Lydia sat alone and sipped her coffee, she felt more comfortable than she did anywhere else. She was unknown to all but the employees, who knew her face and how she liked her coffee but nothing else.

Marlow strode in one summer evening, wearing a gray wool overcoat that fell to her knees. The bell attached to the door rang as she entered, heralding her arrival. She had a plaid scarf around her neck and well-worn hiking boots on her feet. In other words, she was a sight to see.

Lydia just happened to look up from her coffee as Marlow walked in, the door ringing the bell as she opened it. At first, she mistook Marlow for a boy, and a handsome boy at that. Her short brown hair framed her heart-shaped face charmingly. To Lydia's discomfort, she found Marlow no less attractive upon discovering that she was indeed female.

Lydia saw the strange young woman approaching her and felt like she was in a dream. No one in the café ever spoke a word to her, and now a beautiful stranger was approaching her with certainty in her stride. The surreal sensation only intensified when the stranger sat down across from her at the corner table and extended her hand. “The name's Joyce Marlow, Marlow for short.” Her voice was deep and husky. “What's yours?”

She suddenly found herself at a loss for words. “Lydia. Lydia Graham.” She wanted to ask, what's the meaning of this? Why are you sitting at my table? Who do you think you are? An awkward moment passed before she remembered to shake the woman's hand.

“How's the coffee here? Can I try yours?” Before Lydia could say no, the coffee's great, trust me, now please order your own, Marlow picked up the mug and took a long, slow drink. “Very good. Maybe I'd like my own. Hey, waiter!” she called hoarsely. Lydia wondered if she had a cold. “Get me one just like this!” She motioned to Lydia's cup of coffee.

The patrons looked at Marlow with discontent for a moment, but she didn't seem to notice. Lydia did, however, and she didn't want to be associated with someone so obnoxious, no matter how mysterious and beautiful. “Marlow – that's your name, isn't it?”

“You bet, gorgeous.”

Lydia blushed. “Oh. Well, I –”

“You what?”

“I was just going to say that you're being a little loud, that's all. This place is pretty low-key, so maybe you should tone it down a little.”

A waiter came by and set a coffee mug identical to Lydia's in both appearance and contents on the table. “I'm deaf in one ear,” Marlow said with a grin. “So I talk louder than most.”

“Oh.” Lydia blushed deeper yet, wondering if she could possibly be acting any more foolish. “Really?”

Marlow laughed heartily before taking a long swig of her own coffee. It looked too hot to drink, but she didn't seem to care. “Of course not! Gosh, you're awful sore, aren't you?”

“I guess I am.” She wanted to finish her coffee and get out of there. She felt depressed thinking that not even the Chestnut Café was safe anymore. 

Marlow rested her elbows on the table and leaned in. She smelled of black coffee and men's cologne. “I'd like to see you again. Do you come here often?”

“I – um, no, I don't. I'm not much of a coffee drinker, really,” she lied. The lie was far too inept to be believed, but that couldn't stop her from trying.

The two women finished their coffee in silence, and they paid separately. Marlow's voice was soft but still husky when she looked up at Lydia's face and asked, “Can I talk to you outside for a minute?”

Although she felt apprehensive about leaving the café with Marlow, she answered, “Sure.” Lydia heard the chiming of the bell behind them as they left.

Marlow pointed across the street to a green area lined with trees. “Do you mind if we go to the park?”

“No, I don't mind at all,” she lied again. They walked across the street to the park.

They stood beneath the green canopy of chestnut trees that filtered the electric glow of the streetlights. The night was dark and starless; not even the gleaming of the moon could penetrate the layers of clouds. Only the orange streetlights and the blinding glare of passing cars' headlights illuminated Marlow's handsome, masculine face in the darkness. “Look,” she started. “I know I really made a fool of myself back there, but I hope you don't hate me for it. I came into the café because I saw your face in the window and I – I couldn't help myself. You're remarkable.” Marlow gently took Lydia's hands in hers. “I felt something when I saw you.”

Lydia had no words; she tended to lose them when someone threw a lot of them at her, particularly with such sincerity and passion behind them. In all her nineteen years, no one had ever spoken such genuine words to her. She was plain and bookish, the kind of girl boys ignored and other girls teased. “I never knew I was remarkable,” she murmured.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing.” She felt Marlow's hands curled around hers, felt the quiet pulse of their hearts beating together. Marlow's hands were just like hers, small and trembling.

“So, you'll see me again?” Her eyes were too earnest for Lydia to say no.

So began a romance so plain, so textbook, so altogether ordinary that no moviegoer would ever dream of buying a ticket. Strangers meet in a café, walk to the park, confess their love at first sight. Lydia could practically hear David O. Selznick yawning. “So, what's the gimmick? They're both girls? C'mon, you've been in Hollywood long enough to know you can't put trash like that on the screen. Haven't you ever heard of something called the Hays Production Code?” She could see Selznick tossing her love story aside, perched atop a staggering reject pile.

Lydia's eyes were still shiny from crying when she walked out of the cinema. In broad daylight once more, she felt ashamed of the red rings around her eyes. It was 1946, and Lydia was twenty-five years old. She was twenty-five years old and she had done next to nothing in her life, aside from her clandestine affair with another woman, which wasn't much to speak of.

She staggered home, the weight of memory pressing heavily down on her slumped shoulders as her eyes started to tear up again. Marlow. It was four years since she'd seen Marlow last, and still she thought of her every day.

The end of Lydia and Marlow was nothing like Casablanca – no cryptic rain-soaked letters or tearful airport goodbyes. It was an anticlimax, a real clean break. They sat at the same table in the Chestnut Café where they had first met, sipping their coffee and holding hands under the table. It was one of those lazy summer days late in August, and night was falling. Outside, the air settled gently over everything, quiet and empty and stale. Marlow's eyes were half-closed like they always were when she was happy. “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if I had been a boy instead?” she asked, barely opening her mouth for each word.

“Sometimes,” Lydia answered, in a daze herself. She squeezed Marlow's hand, and she felt real again. “I try not to, though.”

“Why not?”

“It's no use thinking about things you can't change.”

Marlow laughed and shrugged. Whenever they got to talking about anything serious, she always laughed and shrugged – not that Lydia minded it. “Come on, let's go outside.”

They walked this same route just about every evening in the summer: meet at the café, go across to the park, walk home. There were no surprises, and Lydia didn't want any surprises, not usually. That night, she and Marlow walked farther and farther into the trees as the sky darkened completely. They reached a wishing well nestled in a tiny clearing in the trees; when the moon illuminated it, Lydia could see that it was in a state of disrepair. Without warning, Marlow pressed Lydia up against a tree and kissed her passionately. Marlow's chest rose and fell quickly against hers; she could feel each shallow breath.

“I can't walk home with you tonight,” Marlow said breathlessly once they parted. They kept their arms around each other's waists, and their faces stayed close. “I'll see you tomorrow: same time, same place.”

Lydia didn't respond for a moment; her eyes had fixed on Marlow's face for a moment longer than was comfortable. Something didn't look right about her face. Perhaps it was the eerie glow of the moonlight on her skin, or her unusually placid countenance. Lydia snapped out of it soon enough. “All right.”

“Good. I'll see you.” Lydia stood against the tree and watched Marlow pass the little wishing well and walk deeper into the thickening trees until she disappeared. She wondered only briefly where Marlow might be going.

Same time, same place the next day, Lydia waited. She ordered three coffees at the Chestnut Café before she finally admitted to herself that Marlow wasn't going to arrive, no matter how long she waited. The feeling of dread knotted tighter in her stomach with each coffee; she finished each cup a little faster than the last. The caffeine only intensified her feelings of abandonment and loneliness. Lydia looked at the clock. It was six forty-seven on a Sunday evening in August 1942, and Marlow wasn't coming – she just wasn't.

Lydia climbed the creaky stairs to her lousy third-floor apartment overlooking a street lined with lousy apartments just like hers. The cinema had only made her feel worse, and she dreaded returning to her dull job as a typist in the morning. The work didn't bother her, but the ladies who worked alongside her drove her up a wall. You'd think that after a few years of working together, they'd run out of nasty gossip to spread about each other.

She sat at the kitchen table and pulled the cord for the bare light bulb above her head, silently praying that the light would come on. With a tentative flicker, it came to life, reassuring Lydia that she had been able to pay the electric bill that month. Although she never found anything of interest in it, she opened the newspaper and flipped aimlessly through the pages. She clutched the flimsy paper in an iron grip as a nondescript item in the Society section drew her in.

Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Marlow proudly announce the engagement of their daughter, Miss Joyce Magnolia Marlow, to Mr. James Lawrence Thompson, son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Thompson. Miss Marlow and Mr. Thompson are planning their ceremony for next September in their hometown.

She read it over and over again until the text became jumbled and nonsensical in her mind, nothing more than a meaningless combination of letters. Only once the message sank in did her stomach begin to turn. A sense of unreality overcame her, and she feverishly alternated between laughing and crying as she sank to the floor, muttering, “Oh lord, oh lord...”

Lying on the linoleum, she realized why she had been crying at the cinema.

They sat down in front while a second-rate Selznick melodrama played on the screen. They weren't afraid to hold hands because from the back, Marlow looked, sounded, and acted just like a boy. Neither woman cared much about the film; instead, they were engaged in an intense, whispered discussion of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2. Squeezing Marlow's hand, Lydia implored, “But I can't understand for the life of me why Hal does that – pretends not to recognize Falstaff, I mean.”

The soft light and shadow of the film danced across Marlow's face as she answered, “Hal needed to let him go. He was a fool and a coward, and a king can't be spending his time with fools and cowards.”

“But that's not what I mean. I know that.” Lydia took Marlow's other hand in hers; she felt safer when she could hold on to Marlow. The alternating light and darkness flickering across her face made her seem a transient figure, as intangible as a ghost in the darkened theater. “Falstaff might have been a fool and a coward, but he was a human being, and he was Hal's friend. Don't you think kings ought to be kind to their friends?”

Marlow smiled the easy, understanding way she always did, whether they were arguing about Shakespeare or life itself. “It's not so simple as that. Falstaff was a liability, and Hal couldn't have such a man dragging him down. He was a king, and kings have things to accomplish. You see?”

“It's still all nonsense to me,” Lydia muttered, laughing, as she leaned into Marlow's shoulder and closed her eyes peacefully. She felt Marlow's fingers running through her hair, calming her further. Somewhere in the distance, she heard the voices of actors playing out a story she had long since abandoned.

“We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” Marlow recited in the softest voice Lydia had ever heard come out of her mouth. “We've heard them, you and I. We've had our time.”

They kissed quietly, their identities unknown and unknowable in the darkness. Outside, the chestnut trees were losing their leaves.

Once Lydia finally picked herself up off the floor, she began to collect her thoughts. Who was this James Lawrence Thompson, and why was Marlow marrying him? Although she had tried her best over the past three years not to speculate about what Marlow had made of herself, she had always figured she'd find a young, beautiful woman to live with secretly, not a man to live with openly. Even at the very end, she never thought Marlow would do something so inauthentic and false. She sauntered over to the mirror, looked at her tangled hair and bloodshot eyes, and knew instantly what she needed to do.

At the telegraph office, she silently penned a telegram to the address where she knew Marlow had been living last.

WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU – STOP  
MEET AT WISHING WELL IN PARK EIGHT PM WEDNESDAY – STOP  
LYDIA GRAHAM

On her way home, she stopped at the hairdresser's and waited her turn patiently. When she finally sat down in the salon chair, she barked, “Cut it off, all of it. It burdens me.” She could see the pained expression on the hairdresser's face in the mirror as she silently complied. She couldn't help but smile deviously as lock after lock of her long, curly hair tumbled to the floor.

She stopped into the office Monday morning knowing full well that it would be her last visit. Upon arriving ten minutes late, poorly dressed, and nearly bald, she watched as the ladies she had worked alongside for six miserable months stopped their typing and gawked. When the boss finally came out and fired her, she felt relieved in collecting her things and walking out for the last time.

As soon as Lydia returned home, she wished she had chosen a nearer day to meet Marlow. Wednesday seemed an eternity away. Gently stroking the soft, cropped hair on her head, she wondered how she would keep the lights on without her typing salary. Thinking about money made her head spin, so she quit soon enough. She ruminated on other trifles, like what her parents would think of her now. She remembered constantly telling them, “I'm going out,” and hearing their response, “With whom?” The question was never where, or when, or why – just with whom. They always asked even though they knew the answer: “I'm going out with Marlow.”

Her mother took a long drag on her cigarette. “I don't think you ought to be spending so much time with this... Miss Marlow.” Marlow's name passed her mother's lips with disdain.

“And why not?”

Lydia's mother now directed her disdain toward her. “Well, you really ought to be getting married at your age, wouldn't you say?”

She hesitated, hands trembling wildly behind her back. “That's nothing to do with Marlow.”

“You and I know it's everything to do with Marlow.”

Lydia made the decision that evening to take a job at the munitions plant and move out of her parents' house. If she wanted to be with Marlow, she couldn't rely on anyone to help her.

The munitions plant job had only fallen out six months ago when the war had ended and the men had come home and wanted their jobs back. Yet Lydia still needed to pay rent, so she took on the typing job that made her so miserable. The women at the munitions plant were different from the women at the office – they were women like her, women who wanted to support themselves and their country. They preferred work to idleness and friendly talk to malicious gossip. They were the type who wouldn't have minded if she'd cut off her hair.

Wednesday came faster than she'd anticipated, and she spent the majority of the evening in the Chestnut Café, which she hadn't visited in years. The employees were different people, and even if they had been the same and Lydia had kept her hair, they wouldn't have recognized her. The café was more crowded than she remembered, but her table by the window was still free. She sat there for hours, drinking coffee after coffee, pondering what she would do when she went to meet Marlow.

Lydia's hands started to tremble again. She stared down into her empty coffee mug, searching fruitlessly for an image that would not present itself. She couldn't see Marlow's face; she knew it would remain shrouded in the fog of memory until she saw it for herself once more.

Eight o'clock approached like an ominous figure crossing to your side of the street late at night. Each movement of the second hand was a movement closer to a movement of the minute hand, which drew closer and closer to the twelve – three minutes, four minutes, five minutes passed before Lydia gained the courage to leave the café. As she crossed to the park across the way, she realized her greatest fear: that Marlow would not come at all.

She walked into the woods as the sun sank lower and lower, her heart beginning to race as she came closer and closer to the wishing well where Marlow would be standing, leaning against the crumbling stone. By the time she reached the clearing where the wishing well still stood, darkness had fallen, but she could see a slender figure leaning against the wishing well, a copper coin clutched between two fingertips. Lydia took care to approach in such a way that she could not be seen or heard, hiding behind trees and avoiding the little clearings in the canopy where moonlight came through.

She watched intently as the young woman dropped the coin into the wishing well, and she listened closely as it dropped insignificantly to the bottom. The young woman's brown hair still framed her face charmingly but now fell to her shoulders and was curled stylishly at the ends. She wore a white dress that looked brand-new but fit her poorly, too loose at the waist and too tight at the shoulders. When the moonlight fell brightly across her face with a quick turn of her head, Lydia could see the masculine features still showing themselves through the heavy makeup, and she knew then that it was Marlow. 

It was Marlow, insecurely twisting a lock of hair between her fingers; Marlow, slowly kneeling beside the wishing well; Marlow, resting her forehead against the crumbling stone and weeping.

Lydia would have been willing to bet that no one had called this young woman Marlow in years. She felt sick to her stomach as she watched the young woman weep, wanting all at once to scream at her and hold her and shake her and kiss her. She did none of those. Instead she remained in the shadows, watching, watching her idol fall to pieces. Her stomach turned and turned, and finally she walked away, her footsteps silent among the still trees.

The café was quiet and empty again, just how Lydia liked it. It always cleared out around nine, she remembered. A waiter approached her table by the window. “Ma'am, do you need more coffee?” he asked.

“Yes, please.” He poured it and disappeared.

The café then became so quiet that Lydia could discern the words of the jazz song that played softly in the background. A twisted smile spread across her lips, and she lifted a hand to her mouth. Still, she couldn't contain her laughter.

The waiter stopped in his tracks and turned toward her. “Ma'am, are you all right? Ma'am?”

She couldn't stop laughing; she couldn't. She was hysterical. The café, the park, the wishing well, the moon – the pieces fit so perfectly, all except the children's carousel.


End file.
